Literary images of Ontario

Ontario has a richly textured literary landscape, from John Richardson's frontier fiction to Alice Munro's small towns, from Susanna Moodie's pioneer society to Margaret Atwood's contemporary Toronto, from Hugh Hood's cottage country to Timothy Findley's Rosedale. Since the late eighteenth century, travellers, poets, and novelists have tried to recreate Ontario imaginatively. In this very personal study William Keith explores this heritage and the elements of the province that have most fascinated creative writers throughout its history. Keith skillfully evokes the multiple, changing, and complex images embodied in Ontario's literary tradition. He examines them within a framework of responses to the landscape, the Native peoples, and the settlement process, and of the portrayals of existence on the farm and in small towns and cities. He concludes with a comparison of the vivid and often hostile images of Toronto as it has grown from a ragged pioneer capital to become first the epitome of Anglo-Saxon piety and hypocrisy and now a multicultural metropolis - but one in which 'the surviving, intervening trees' obscure and balance the mechanized city.